3 reasons you should attend the USASBE conference in New Orleans in January:

1. Free drinks!
2. Learn about new methods and tools to engage your students (we are leading 5 sessions)
3. Attend the Innovator’s Dinner and meet thought leaders

This annual conference is an incredible few days where entrepreneurship educators, scholars, and practitioners plan entrepreneurship programs and share their bold teaching, scholarship, and practice work and ideas.

If you’re going, we’ll see you there!

Happy Hour Is On Us!

Let’s get the important stuff out of the way first. We will be hosting our third-annual happy hour party. Like last year’s engaging event, we will be paying for drinks for the first 100 people who register!

 

 

Innovator’s Dinner – Meet Thought Leaders

This year, we are experimenting with an “Innovator’s Dinner” on Friday night. This will be a special gathering for 20 innovators where you can connect with like-minded, innovative entrepreneurship educators in an intimate setting. We will be

• Sharing best practices!
• Connecting with innovators and possible collaborators
• Learning ways to better engage our students

We are offering a limited number of Innovator’s Dinner tickets for $75, which includes a full Creole dinner, free drinks, inspiring conversations, and a couple group activities we have in mind 😉

5 Talks + A Competition

We will lead a handful of sessions during the conference:

60 Minute MVP 2.0

This is an intense and exciting exercise that teaches critical aspects of the entrepreneurial mindset and lean start-up methodology, namely the iterative process of hypothesis testing through the creation of minimum viable products (MVPs). In 60 minutes, with no prior technical expertise, students work in teams to design a landing page, create an explainer video, and set up a way to measure pre-launch demand from prospective customers by accepting pre-orders or email addresses. USASBE attendees will get to experience creating an MVP themselves, and will leave with a detailed lesson plan they can use to run this exercise back in their classes.

Customer Interviewing:
Learning the Basics Through Gamification

This is a fun, interactive exercise where educators use a combination of Customer Interviewing Playing Cards which they can print out, and an online collaborative quiz game (Kahoot) to teach core customer interviewing skills. Specifically, it will demonstrate to students:

• What their problem interviewing goals should be and should not be
• Based on their interviewing goals, they will learn what questions they should and should not ask during customer interviews

USASBE attendees will leave the session with a PDF of the interview playing cards they can print out when they return to school, access to the interviewing quiz game, a copy of a recommended interview script template and a detailed lesson plan on how to use the interviewing cards, game and script in class.

Entrepreneurs vs. Inventors:
The Lottery Ticket Dilemma

This exercise provides a fun, experiential way for students to conceptualize customer behavior, and identify business opportunities, by demonstrating it’s not actually customer problems that drive behavior, but customer emotions. After this game-based activity, students understand why some products are successful even if they don’t solve an obvious problem, and how to leverage that fact to identify non-problem based opportunities. Attendees to this session will get to experience the lesson themselves, and leave with a lesson plan they can use to integrate this exercise in their classes.

Fears and Curiosities:
Engaging ALL Students on Day 1

Not all of our entrepreneurship students want to start companies. Fortunately, entrepreneurship education isn’t about starting companies; it’s about developing skills and a mindset that will serve our students whether they start a company now, later, or never. This exercise helps students understand the value of their entrepreneurship classes, even if they never envision themselves becoming an entrepreneur, which helps them to engage in the class from the first day. USASBE attendees experience the exercise themselves and then leave with a detailed lesson plan so they can use this exercise in their class.

Normalizing Failing Through the Wish Game

This exercise was borrowed from faculty at Stanford University and developed into the foundation of an MBA Entrepreneurship course to teach entrepreneurship skills by having classmates iteratively deliver wishes for each other. In this exercise, students write down big, specific wishes, such as being able to meet a celebrity, or visiting a certain place. The professor chooses one person to be the wish grantee, and the rest of the class works for a period of time to deliver that wish at a future date of the professor’s choosing.
This exercise is about hyper-collaboration, so all students benefit by working together under considerable constraints. This exercise is a powerful path for students to learn entrepreneurial skills like ideation, customer interviewing, prototyping, selling, and mobilizing resources, all in the context of creating memorable experiences for their fellow classmates.

Defending Our Title!

We are excited to defend our title as the reigning Excellence in Experiential Exercises (3E) champion from USASBE2019. We were honored to receive this recognition for our “A Better Toothbrush: Testing Assumptions via Customer Observations” exercise, which is a vital part of our award-winning Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum. That recognition motivated us to design more engaging exercises for you and your students.

 

 

 

 

We hope to see you there!

Justin, Doan and Federico

 

 

Missed Our Recent Articles?

Whether you are new to our community of entrepreneurship educators, or you’ve been contributing for years, we wanted to give you a list of the posts our community finds most valuable:

• Improve Student Idea Generation. This lesson plan enables your students to build ideas around the customers they are most passionate about helping, and the problems they are most excited to help them resolve.
• Improve Your Students’ Customer Interviews. This lesson plan helps your students conduct higher quality interviews with customers by learning exactly what to ask during a customer interview, and how to ask it.
• “The best class I’ve taken!”  We all want a Dead Poets Society moment in our entrepreneurship class. One professor using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum got hers!

Join 70+ Universities Using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum!

Request a preview of the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) today and make this Spring the most engaging semester of entrepreneurship yet! Our curriculum is full of experiential exercises that will make your students’ learning come alive.